AO3 is a bespoke, industrially upcycled textile piece created for the Slow Fashion Lab held at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. The show was part of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Fast Fashion exhibition.
AO3 considers sustainability practices inevitably complicit in unsustainable practices.
The making of AO3 practically explored creative strategies to insert crafted control into digital, automated and industrial textile and garment production systems and introduce new processes and materials into traditional practices. The work incorporated and aesthetically resolved opposed textile and thread types within a single garment.
AO3 is comprised of 3 upcycled textile panels, sourced in a waste storage room at a weaving facility in Ho Chi Minh City. Laser cutting, digital embroidery and hand embroidery were used as upcycling strategies to recontextualise pre-consumer textile waste in a way that allowed for the materiality of each to direct the surface design approach. Local flowers ginger lily, jasmine & phalanoepsis orchid and their synthetic imposters were visually referenced to allude to our ideas around nature/beauty and purity/pollution.
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2017/jul/imagining-a-future-without-fashion-waste
https://www.mkg-hamburg.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2015/fast-fashion.html
https://www.mkg-hamburg.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2015/fast-fashion.html